Reorder by Velocity and Expiry Watch: Never Miss a Restock

The pain: restocking by memory and losing to the calendar

Restock day in most shops works like this. The owner walks the shelves with a rough mental list, adds whatever "feels finished", and heads to the market. Two things go wrong, quietly and expensively.

First, the memory list is built from what you noticed, not what sold. The fast mover that got restocked last Tuesday looks full, so it is skipped, and it runs out on Friday, the busiest day. Every stockout of a daily item does double damage: the missed sale itself, and the customer who learned that your neighbour also sells indomie.

Second, the calendar is eating your slow stock. Yoghurt, bread spreads, juices, and in a pharmacy nearly everything, all carry expiry dates. The items sit at the back, out of sight, until the day someone picks one up, checks the date, and you quietly bin ₦15,000 of stock you fully paid for. Expiry losses are the most preventable losses in retail, because the date was printed on the pack the whole time. What was missing was a system that reads the dates against the pace of sales.

What the two cards do

Two of Gazeloft's eight shelf insight cards attack exactly these problems, both computed from your recorded movement with a 365-day lookback:

Reorder by velocity ranks your products by how fast they truly sell. Not by how empty the shelf looks, not by what you remember, but by units moved over time in your actual sales records. The card effectively hands you a restock list sorted by urgency: fastest movers running low come first. Combined with low stock alerts, which fire before a product hits zero, the fast movers stop surprising you.

Expiry watch flags products that are approaching their expiry dates while there is still time to act. The point of the card is not to record your losses, it is to prevent them: an item flagged three weeks out can be discounted, moved to the front of the shelf, bundled into baskets and sold, recovering most of its cost instead of none of it.

Step by step: in the app

1. Record your sales through the cart and your restocks with quantity and cost, as usual. The cards feed entirely on these records.
2. For perishables and medicines, keep expiry information on your products so expiry watch has dates to track.
3. Before each restock trip, open your retail space's insights and read reorder by velocity from the top. That order, top to bottom, is your shopping list ranked by what the shop actually needs.
4. Check expiry watch at the same sitting. Anything flagged gets an action today: discount it, front-shelf it, or push it in customer conversations.
5. Let low stock alerts cover you between reviews. When a fast mover runs down mid-week, the alert tells you before the shelf does.

Step by step: on the web dashboard

1. Log in at gazeloft.com, open the retail space and go to insights.
2. Review both cards on the big screen and write the restock list directly from the velocity ranking.
3. Cross-check the shelf value card at the same time: it tells you how much capital is currently on the shelf, which helps you decide how big the restock budget should be this week.

A worked example: one restock trip, done by data

Amina runs a mini-mart in Ilorin with about 250 products. Her usual restock budget is ₦180,000 a week, spent mostly by feel. This week she reads the cards first.

Reorder by velocity shows her top movers over the recent period:

• Indomie sachets: about 320 sold per week, current stock 3 days' worth
• Pure water bags: about 45 per week, 2 days left
• Sugar packs: about 60 per week, 4 days left
• Peak milk tins: about 50 per week, 6 days left

Further down, the surprises: a biscuit brand she always buys is selling only 8 packs a week and still has 5 weeks of stock. A detergent she considered dropping is quietly doing 35 units a week and is nearly out.

She rebuilds the list. The ₦25,000 she would have spent on biscuits goes into indomie (2 extra cartons at ₦11,500 each) and the detergent. The trip costs the same ₦180,000, but every naira now lands on products with proven pace. The following week she has zero stockouts on her top five for the first time in months. If indomie alone had gone missing for two days, at roughly 46 sachets a day and ₦62 average margin, that quiet gap would have cost about ₦5,700 in profit plus the customers who drifted next door.

Expiry watch flags 24 bottles of a fruit drink expiring in 15 days. Shelf value at the normal ₦600 price: ₦14,400, cost about ₦10,800. She cuts the price to ₦450, moves them beside the counter and mentions them to every basket over ₦2,000. Twenty-one bottles sell before the date: ₦9,450 recovered against a cost of ₦10,800, a small loss of ₦1,350 instead of losing nearly the full ₦10,800 to the bin. One card paid for the month's subscription six times over.

Tips and pitfalls

• Trust the velocity ranking over the eye test. A shelf can look full and still hold only three days of a fast mover, or look empty and hold five weeks of a slow one.
• Restock fast movers in bigger multiples and slow movers in smaller ones. Velocity data is exactly the licence you need to stop buying evenly across the board.
• For pharmacies, expiry watch is not optional housekeeping, it is the business. Review it every single week without fail.
• Discount expiring stock early and lightly rather than late and desperately. A 15 to 25 percent cut three weeks out usually clears stock that a 50 percent cut three days out cannot.
• Record every restock the day it lands, with its true cost. The velocity card needs the movement history, and your weighted-average cost needs the price.

Restock like you can see the future

You do not need luck to stop missing restocks. You need your own sales history, read properly, before every trip. Let reorder by velocity write the list and expiry watch guard the dates. Stop guessing. Start seeing, at gazeloft.com.